I have successfully rendered myself a liar this week. After calling myself “basically unemployable” back in 2018, I started a new part-time position with Source Design this week. Super stressed Jem who couldn’t possibly contemplate a 9-5 way back in 2018 is now super chilled out handling a senior dev position for one firm, managing director for another, and freelancing between the two.
At some point between 2018 and now my capacity for workload and perceived “stress” increased dramatically, and y’know, I’m pretty sure it was my diagnosis. It’s amazing what a difference it makes not constantly beating yourself up; all that mental energy spent berating myself for being ‘shit’ and incapable of handling day to day life can now be spent on chasing dreams and doing crazy spur of the moment things.
And taking on this position was spur of the moment… in part, driven by motivation to stop drawing a salary from Ultimately Better temporarily which will allow funds to build up in the business. Those funds will eventually go to hiring a junior developer, someone I can train, mentor, build up.
A decision also taken in the spirit of change. My son goes up to secondary school this year (his first choice was confirmed today!) which means that the school runs that have massively dictated my schedule – my life – for the past 10 years or so… they are no more! What better way to celebrate this massive milestone than by doing something a bit mad?
I’m hoping it’s not a decision that only works for me. I’d really like my knowledge and experience both as dev and heading up my own agency to bring new things to the table for Source; that it ends up being a partnership with mutual benefits.
Who says auties can’t handle change, right?
Lead image by Ross Findon
Six things I do to make developing gutenberg-based WordPress websites easier to develop and maintain.
(Update 2019-08-07: this article is now available in Brazilian Portuguese: 10 dicas para um site WordPress mais rápido) — Website speed is a huge factor in your search engine (specifically Google) ranking: As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly… read full entry »
Wow, that title is a bit of a mouthful. OK, so let me decipher: you can customise WordPress excerpts to add a “read more” link to post excerpts, e.g. as per this (cleaned up) example from the codex: function new_excerpt_more( $more ) { global $post; return ‘<a class=”moretag” href=”‘. get_permalink( $post->ID ) . ‘”>Read the… read full entry »
What do you do when you try and find a site that allows the re-sale of preloved cloth nappies but the only one that did exist has closed down operations? You buy the site of course. As briefly alluded to in the last post, I’ve bought into a new project which I’m hoping will give… read full entry »
I’ve mentioned a couple of times this month that I’ve been working with a client for a dedicated 8 hours a week to give me a little bit of fixed income and gets me out of the house twice a week. Despite needing to get out of the house, I’ve decided to change the arrangement:… read full entry »
I had a couple of clients (rightly) tell me off this week because schedules had slipped and this wasn’t communicated as well as it could have been. I only have myself to blame, and I don’t mind being honest about it. I should have better anticipated the impact of the summer holidays and time off… read full entry »
I officially released the premium version of my PHP mail form last night. Partly because it’s been on the cards for a while, and partly because I wanted to get started on my plan to be mortgage free in five years. I can’t hang about if I need to be paying in £1,633.09 per month…. read full entry »
* sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Yesterday I opened my work inbox first thing to a panicked email from a client (Sutton Community Farm) labelled “URGENT” – their website had gone down (again) with a Resource Limit Reached error. I quickly shot off a reply to let them know that this was usually caused by… read full entry »
Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem… read full entry »
